This invention relates to expert systems, and in particular to a system in which computational resources are invoked by a user without direct intervention.
The increasing use of expert systems as diagnostic tools in service industries has established that knowledge embedded systems can provide quality expertise within defined domains. Most prior systems, however, do not appreciate the usefulness of technical documentation as a resource for human experts when performing diagnostic tasks. On-line technical manuals can aid the user by greatly enhancing the potential for success. Typical prior art systems which do recognize this asset simply provide interfaces for browsing on-line documentation in a "help text" format. This documentation, however, is usually the result of experts and developers rewriting, in an abbreviated form, the content of technical manuals. The exact technical documentation contained in the manuals, and used by most technicians in the field, is not provided. By rewriting the documentation, the experts and developers increase the time to develop a system, and decrease the original content. Because the documentation does not rely on the actual manuals, which are maintained independently, the life cycle costs of maintaining this "help text" documentation is high.
Some help systems have relied on expert systems to add "intelligence" to the help system. One such prior art system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,103,498, entitled "Intelligent Help System." In that system a monitoring device "watches" the system-user interface and determines what monitoring information to store. This information, together with the physical state of the system, is stored in a knowledge base. An inference engine tests rules against the knowledge base data to generate help text. Unfortunately, in this system the user must request help, and that help is supplied as help text.
A system applied specifically to the medical information field provided a method of automatic information retrieval by evaluating the observed manifestations and possible diagnosis. It then provided access to relevant medical texts. The system is described in P. L. Elkin, et al., "Closing the Loop on Diagnostic Decision Support Systems," 14th Annual Symposium on Computer Applns. in Medical Care, Standards in Medical Informatics, Washington, D.C. (November 1990), IEEE Computer Soc. Press. Unfortunately, the technical details of the system are still unclear.
Furthermore, in many prior art systems computational resources typically were, in a sense, turned "on" and "off" by the user. By this we mean that the user decided when to process particular information to determine interrelationships among all of the entered information. In such systems users are unaware of all of the capabilities of the system and thus often overlook valuable computational resources.
Another restriction of prior art systems is that they are restricted to locally available computational resources and do not take advantage of remote computational resources available via a network.